I like sparrows. I think they’re cute. We have a ton of birds around our house and we feed them daily and the tiny sparrows are the most courageous of all. When even the bigger birds are perching at a cautious distance, these little guys don’t hesitate to get close, and as a result get first crack at everything. They’ve got moxie and that’s why I like them.

So, when I had to choose a subject to practice illustration, I decided to draw some sparrows. Looking for reference photos inevitably led to reading up on them on Wikipedia. And what I found, shocked me!

In India, the number of sparrows in cities has been falling sharply. They’ve practically disappeared from many large cities and nature lovers encourage people to put up nesting boxes to help them recover their numbers. But that’s not the attitude most of the rest of the world has towards these beautiful little birds.

You see, sparrows are a highly successful species of birds because they’re commensal with humans. They have been living around humans for around 10,000 years. They’re not fussy about what they eat or where they nest. They breed prodigiously; having 4 broods in a season. And they can tolerate all kinds of environments. So they’ve been extremely successful everywhere they’ve been introduced. Which is literally the entire world. In fact, sparrows are the most widely distributed bird on the planet.

All of this just makes me fall even more in love with these cutie-patooties. But some people hate them for these exact reasons. Especially bird watchers and bird lovers!

I found an article from the sources on Wikipedia on the website of the Audubon Naturalist Society which talked about how bad sparrows are because they take over every region and make it hard for other species of birds to survive in that region. Native species struggle wherever sparrows arrive.

The article went on to quote Lola Oberman, author of The Pleasures of Watching Birds, as saying, “They’re terrorists.” And how she traps them and then kills them by applying pressure on their neck until the bird dies!

Can you believe that? Bird lovers killing birds!

Why? Because they make it hard for the bird watchers to sight other birds. And they don’t find sparrows beautiful enough to watch. The article says right in the first paragraph, “Their plumage and markings are unremarkable and their song is a cloying, repetitive chirp.“

Such hatred towards a bird from bird lovers is just confounding.

I understand that sparrows make it hard for the native birds, probably driving some of them to extinction. But it’s not like they’re doing this with some kind of evil intent. All birds are doing the same thing; trying to survive. Don’t hate sparrows because they’re more successful than everyone else.

There is so much arrogance in this way of thinking. We want to watch different colorful birds. We want a variety of birds to nest in our backyards and feed from our feeders. And so, we decide to kill a certain species of bird, just because it’s too successful and we don’t like its grey brown colors!

The irony is that aren’t these tiny sparrows doing exactly what we mighty humans are doing?

We’ve taken over the planet. We destroy habitats and erase entire species from the face of the planet. And when a species of bird adapts to live around us and piggyback on our success, we decide to kill it. Because how dare another species do what we are doing. Only we get to make animals extinct! Not sparrows!

If you’re in a part of the world where sparrows are considered pests, I implore you to not play God and let nature take care of who gets to live and who goes extinct. I thought bird watching was about enjoying the antics of these tiny dinosaurs, not about ticking off how many species of birds you’ve taken pictures of. If you agree with me, just enjoy whatever birds come to your backyard and maybe now if you see a sparrow, you’ll appreciate how plucky these little birds are.